Electronic Foorplans

[CampbellR66]

i have read a lot of posts about the virtues of a number of mapping tools for use with FG II, i own fractal mapper and to be honest i cant produce anything of worth out of it in the time i have available.

i the good old days i used card floor plans and graph paper ... are there any electronic equivalents. Where i could buy floor plan packs ( A bit like Visio stencils) and the drag and drop them onto a surface layer with layers for other stuff and then export the map to paint.net for a final face lift?

I note there are PDF versions of the card floor plans for sale but no package to use them?

[Zeus]

You didn't mention what genre of RPG your looking for floor plans. I think what your interested in would equate to RPG Tile Packs (collections of tiles for use in table-top miniature games).

If you play D&D you can always take a look at Dungeon Tiles. There's a Yahoo group that have a small application called PyMapper which you can use to build your basic maps before exporting them to Paint.NET.

Check out https://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/dungeon_tiles/

There are also the recently added map adventures packs available on the FG online store (e.g. https://www.fantasygrounds.com/store....xcp?id=DGA030

Do they suit?

[Rienen]

You could check out Dungeon Crafter (I prefer the 1.4 version).
Warning Evidently the home website has been taken over by a virus spammer, so don't go there.

It's a tile based mapping program I use for my players to quickly slap together a map and export it to BMP for final editing in Paint.

EDIT: Thank you drahkar for reminding me I should emphasize the warning.

[drahkar]

Word of Warning
The Dungeon Crafter 3 website listed in google redirects to a squatter with a trojan installer.

Just to be aware.

I know you mentioned it Rienen, but I wanted to make sure people saw the warning. I've submitted a malicious software report with google. Hopefully it'll stop showing up in the searches.

I would recommend everyone else submit as well: https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_badware/ Better chances of it being addressed.

[tdewitt274]

i the good old days i used card floor plans and graph paper ... are there any electronic equivalents. Where i could buy floor plan packs ( A bit like Visio stencils) and the drag and drop them onto a surface layer with layers for other stuff and then export the map to paint.net for a final face lift?

Inkscape. Squares, circles, etc are easy enough to build. As you create your images, keep a stable of icons in a legend and copy/paste them onto your images. Especially convenient for dungeons.

Inkscape provides an Import Image option that you can bring into the image, build your map by overylaying on top, then delete it and export it out.

Visio, from what I understand, handles SVG (which is what Inkscape creates) so you should be able to put items from Visio into the images.

I was thinking of doing something like this a long time ago, but never followed through.

[Sorontar]

Just wondering about Masterplan, I'm sure there is a mapper that pulls in tiles from somewhere. Will have to have a look later, I may be thinking of something else.

[Zeus]

Nope your right, the latest Masterplan (found here) can download all DDI Compendium material into useable modules. You can also very easily create collections of tiles into useable modules.
You still need a DDI account though.


There's also a really neat auto-delve feature that will create a set of encounters and a map at the click of a button.

[bislab]

There's a company called "Paper Make iT" thas has a flashed based product called "Shuffler" that creates maps from a library of tiles. You can add furniture, street features and other layers on top of the tile to make for a more interesting environment. RPGnow has the latest version of a modern library for $12 I believe.

[CampbellR66]

Nope your right, the latest Masterplan (found here) can download all DDI Compendium material into useable modules. You can also very easily create collections of tiles into useable modules.
You still need a DDI account though.


There's also a really neat auto-delve feature that will create a set of encounters and a map at the click of a button.

This is looking Good thank you for the pointer

Just loaded it and taken it for a spin .... its spot on I just need to find some more tiles to add to it

[CampbellR66]

You didn't mention what genre of RPG your looking for floor plans. I think what your interested in would equate to RPG Tile Packs (collections of tiles for use in table-top miniature games).

If you play D&D you can always take a look at Dungeon Tiles. There's a Yahoo group that have a small application called PyMapper which you can use to build your basic maps before exporting them to Paint.NET.

Check out https://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/dungeon_tiles/

There are also the recently added map adventures packs available on the FG online store (e.g. https://www.fantasygrounds.com/store....xcp?id=DGA030

Do they suit?

We are running D&D 3.5 mostly using paste copies of old 3.5 content but i would like to craft more of my own content. I have purchased Fractal mapper but to be honest it takes to much time to produce an average result.

The dream is to buy electronic verisions of the old packs of card floor plans to get a good quality battle map and a tool to assemble them into maps to then use in the VT of your choice. i am hoping one of the commercial tile publishers is seeing this as an opportunity. I have seen a web based solution from one but it is subscription based and i prefer pay as you go.